Rahnama Falavarjani, Atefeh

An Investigation into Interdisciplinary Words and Readability Levels of Research Articles: A Corpus Analysis of Computer Science, Industrial Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering

Technical words are the words that denote specialized meaning relevant to a specific field. By the development of interdisciplinary fields, technical words from different disciplines come together in interdisciplinary areas, and the need for knowing technical words from other technical disciplines arises. The current study aimed to develop a wordlist of frequent technical words in interdisciplinary research articles shared across three disciplines of computer science, industrial engineering, and mechanical engineering. The research enjoyed a hybrid method including keyword analysis and meaning analysis. AntConc. software was used to do keyword analysis, and meaning analysis was done through context and by checking the words’ meanings in technical dictionaries and glossaries. The final technical wordlist included 145 words grouped in 82 word families. The results showed that adopting a hybrid method of keyword analysis and meaning analysis could be more reliable than using each method alone. Also, the proportion (lexical coverage) of high-frequency and academic words in three disciplines was measured through a computer-based method called RANGE. The results showed that the coverage of general, academic, and Non-GSL/AWL words across three fields were very close to each other. However, it seems that computer-based methods that measure lexical coverage of the texts regardless of the words’ meanings in contexts might not be very reliable. In addition, the readability of the articles in terms of idea density in the three majors under investigation was measured by adopting CPIDR software (version 5.1). The readability of the three majors was compared, and computer science had the highest level of idea density and the articles in this major had the lowest readability. The target technical wordlist provides information about the nature and size of specialized words in interdisciplinary technical field, and it can be a vocabulary source in ESP (English for Specific Purposes) for learners and instructors.